Legal Blogs Reignite Controversy Over Miami Shooting



Memos posted online show assistant state attorney's concern after being pulled from case in which police killed 17-year-old
Billy ShieldsMay 28, 2008 Beatriz Luis Garcia said she left Havana in 1993 to find a life away from the repression of Fidel Castro's dictatorship.
Little more than a decade later, she was identifying her 17-year-old son's body after he was shot to death by a Miami-Dade police officer during a burglary attempt. More than four years after the death of Leonardo Barquin, a string of interoffice memos from the state attorney's office has surfaced on the Internet, thrusting the open investigation of the shooting back into the spotlight.
A series of 4-year-old letters between Assistant State Attorney David Ranck and his superiors began surfacing on a Web log maintained by Ranck and were picked up May 4 by the anonymously penned , a blog that focuses on events in Miami-Dade Circuit Court's criminal division.
In the memos, Ranck, who is still a Miami-Dade prosecutor, claimed he was pulled off the investigation into Barquin's death by office brass after he raised questions about whether the shooting by police was justifiable homicide. Ranck said Barquin was shot twice from behind in the lower body Jan. 16, 2004.
"The deceased was found unarmed, and no firearm was found around where he fell nor on the co-defendant when he was captured," Ranck wrote five weeks after the shooting. Ranck sent the memo to Don Horn, chief assistant state attorney for administration; Kathleen Hoague and Howard Pohl, chief assistants for the felony division; senior trial counsel Susan Dechowitz; senior trial counsel Abe Laeser; and senior employment counsel Lorna Salomon with a copy to State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle.
Ranck said his removal from all police shooting investigations six days after Barquin's death was triggered by a call from Miami-Dade police Maj. Angus Butler to Laeser to complain about him. Butler was disturbed by a phone call between Ranck and lead detective Charles McCully, Ranck wrote his bosses Feb. 23, 2004. McCully said he was responding to calls from the Police Benevolent Association asking "what the state was thinking," Ranck wrote in a summary of events.
In a telephone interview Tuesday, Horn defended his decision to remove Ranck from the investigation. He said he wanted to ensure the investigation was conducted fairly. He also said he agreed with the Miami-Dade police that the prosecutor should not have contacted the lead detective at that juncture.
"He's voicing a conclusion to a police officer before he's received the first police report," Horn said. Espinosa, the officer who fired at the suspect, told investigators at the shooting scene that Barquin had a gun, Ranck wrote. On the phone Jan. 20, 2004, McCully told Ranck he thought Espinosa, the officer, said he saw something that looked like a weapon.
Ranck asked McCully to check his notes on that point, and McCully confirmed Ranck's thinking that Espinosa said he saw Barquin with a firearm.
McCully went on to say Barquin had a gun in one hand and a sock in the other. Ranck told McCully that sounded implausible.NO
Ranck said he couldn't tell McCully to tell the PBA representative "this was a clearly justified, uncomplicated shooting."
"This still was 'not a good shoot,'" Ranck wrote. He thought "it was wrong, that it was unnecessary, that the 17-year-old burglar victim should be in jail right now, not dead." Horn told Ranck on Jan. 23, 2004, that his conversation with McCully was "totally inappropriate." Horn's take:
"That was an inappropriate conversation to be having with that detective at that point," he said. "I would have made the same decision over again today. It was inappropriate at that point."
Ranck blamed the call from Butler for his removal from the investigation. His ouster "when that ASA has expressed legitimate, justified reservations about the propriety of the shooting could hardly look worse to a community that has a right to expect independence of this office from the police agency involved," Ranck wrote.
The decision to sideline Ranck "will only embolden" Butler and other police in similar situations, he warned. In another e-mail posting, Ranck wrote to his superiors that he was told he was taken off the investigation for "diplomatic reasons."
Ranck said he and Horn discussed the case further and shook hands, "but I absolutely and vigorously deny that anything I did or said in this investigation was wrong or inappropriate in any way."
Horn said he recently invited Ranck to provide input as the investigation concludes.NO In Garcia's mind, her son and his accomplice, Rolando Llanes, were probably breaking the law, but that doesn't mean her son deserved to die. "They were obviously doing something incorrecto," she said in an interview in Spanish with the Daily Business Review. "But Espinosa was supposedly trained to capture them and put them in front of a judge and allow the judge to decide their fate. He wasn't trained to shoot at an unarmed 17-year-old from behind." Ranck had no comment on the letters. State attorney's office spokesman Ed Griffith also declined comment. Ranck's letters invoke state and federal whistleblower protections. Sources at the state attorney's office indicate the letters appear to be genuine. The situation raises a few questions.
The timing of the blog posts is conspicuous. Horn said the state attorney's office is close to concluding its investigation into Barquin's death and the internal Miami-Dade police investigation is still pending. Horn also said Ranck was replaced by Richard Scruggs on the team investigating the shooting. Scruggs did not return a call for comment by deadline. Ranck was on call to respond to reports of officer-involved shootings the day Barquin was shot. Internal protocol for police shootings calls for at least two specially trained prosecutors from the office's police shooting team to go to the scene.
Espinosa is no longer with the department, and Miami-Dade police spokesman Juan Villalba said the circumstances of his departure are unclear. Espinosa ran a failed campaign for the state Senate in 2006. There was no response to messages left on the cell phone number listed in his campaign papers.
Espinosa said he heard shots, chased Barquin and Llanes to a fence and shot Barquin after the teenager aimed a black, semi-automatic pistol at him, according to police reports. No weapon was recovered near either suspect.
Barquin's family may not have much legal recourse in his death, said Miami solo practitioner David Mishael, who is representing them.
"What laws do you have out there to prosecute the police officer or go after him for civil rights violations?" Mishael asked, noting Florida law allows an officer to shoot at suspected felons who flee crime scenes. "His use of deadly force is permitted by statute, and that's a sad situation."
A separate Florida law transfers criminal liability to Barquin's accomplice. Renaldo Llanes was convicted last year of Barquin's murder under Florida's felony murder rule based on a homicide occurring during the commission of a felony. He is serving a seven-year sentence for murder and burglary of an unoccupied dwelling, according to state Corrections Department records.
"When a police officer shoots a co-defendant in a case, then the other co-defendant gets charged with murder even though the living co-defendant had no intention that his co-defendant gets killed," said Ivonne Cuesta, the assistant public defender who represented Llanes after conviction in a probation matter. "That's the law in Florida. And my position is that it's very unfair."